Existing User

Ronald Tavel's play The Last Days of British Honduras
was produced only once, in 1974, at the Public Theater, as part of
the New York Shakespeare Festival. In Tavel's wide-ranging body of
work - he wrote some of the most iconic Warhol movies ('Vinyl',
1965; 'Chelsea Girls', 1966); co-founded the Playhouse of the
Ridiculous; won an Obie Award for The Boy on the Straight-Back
Chair (1969); provoked an international scandal with
Indira Ghandi's Daring Device (1967) - Last Days
stood out for us as especially eccentric: a slowly churning, highly
discursive colonial Death in Venice scenario combined with
light-comedic and magic-realist elements and placed in the nervy
politico-ethnic context immediately preceding the 1971 British
Honduras (now Belize) referendum on independence. This bid for
independence was in fact rejected, even after the British
administration had largely departed.

The transposition of the colonial drama, crash-landing
it, as it were, from subtropical jungle to wintertime North
American city made counter-intuitive sense to us: a sharply
contrasting geographicmeteorological crossroads of cultures and
histories in which demographic tensions have been historically, and
now all too familiarly, exacerbated. An important part of the
transposition, however, was based on a slice of the Near West Side
of Chicago, a constellation of buildings and other urban features
put by historical circumstance into close proximity - and utilised
by us as filming locations. There are, within the proverbial 40
acres, several lived-in churches; the fairly monstrous United
Center sports and entertainment complex (Michael Jordan's home
court); Malcolm X College, a glass slab not so named because of a
liberationist pedagogy but because residents took a vote on naming
their local city college; and the hulking shell of the
long-abandoned